Here's a great comment by Leo Davidson on Raymond Chen's blog:
Remember that the media is stone-cold wrong whenever they report on a subject you know about in detail. Ask other people about subjects they know about and it seems easy to extrapolate that the media is wrong most of the time about just about everything and, while interesting and a good starting point to discover what's going on in the world, not particularly trustworthy or reliable when it comes to explaining things. (Whether it be because of laziness, bias, agenda, worrying about ratings rather than facts, or taking things from other sources at face value when things may be different in reality. I think it's a mixture of all of those things.)
There are few media outlets that actually do what I would consider worthwhile reporting. One of the few is The Economist. I would be hard pressed to name any others that aren't routinely full of falsehoods, naivety, misinterpretations and hyperbole.